Tag Archives: vocabulary

While aimlessly searching the Internets as I so often do, I came across a Japanese Kanji test aimed at Japanese natives. The quiz purports to test “difficult readings” of certain Kanji, and it doesn’t disappoint. Click here to check it out.

The game is simple enough: a word will appear on screen and you have to enter the correct reading within ten seconds, in Hiragana, to play. There are a grand total of five levels, with five questions each. In other words, get 25 questions correct in a row and you win. Answer a question wrong and the game ends.

Let’s begin:

Quick, you’ve only got 5 seconds left! What’s the answer?

It’s おかみ, of course, meaning a female proprietress of some kind, such as a restaurant or inn owner. But you knew that, right? Perhaps not. Let’s try again.

Haha, why that’s しにせ (although ろうほ is also acceptable), meaning a trustworthy or long-established store that has been passed down for generations. I learned that in my freshman year Japanese 101 class, didn’t you?

I hope my deep sarcasm by now has penetrated through the Internet and into your brain, as these are not “everyday” words, or even words that an average Japanese person would be likely to know without a little effort. And remember that these are level 1 words, with the words getting (supposedly) harder with each level.

The great thing about this particular Kanji test is that it is popular among Japanese internet folks, with quite a few videos appearing online (check out a YouTube search for 漢字テスト) where Japanese people attempt the test in real time, recording their thought process and reactions. I find these fun to watch. For example, the following video is titled “A student preparing for (college) examinations attempts the ogre-level Kanji Test (so hard you’ll laugh)”

He gets fairly far and knows quite a few words without much thinking, but there are still more than a few words in the test that are simply not common knowledge.

The next video (link below) is from Niconico, a popular video sharing site in Japan. In this case the female test-taker in question is, let’s just say, a bit “dumber” than average. You may need a free account to view the video, but I promise you it will be worth it. Be sure to enable Japanese language comments so you can watch her get a Japanese verbal smack-down in real time.

At about 3 and a half minutes into the video the girl taking the test proudly exclaims that the answer is かいせき, only to be completely wrong. The comments that follow include things like「ドヤ顔で間違えんなwww」and 「せめてかいせつじゃないかw」, which mean “don’t act all confident and then get it wrong lmao” and “at the very least you could have guessed kaisetsu lol” respectively (my usage of “lol” and “lmao” here is pretty loose, I’m just translating based on the number of w’s, which indicate laughter in text form).

Of course, if you’re like me, meaning you’re not native in Japanese and not some insane Kanji master dude named Bret Mayer who was the first non-Chinese/Korean person to pass the Kanji Kentei Level 1, then you probably won’t do much better than the girl in the Niconico video. If you attempt the test in front of your Japanese friends or teachers, chances are you’ll only hear things like 漢字が難しいね (Kanji sure is hard) to soothe your pain, which of course it will not.

So how do you beat this test? Well, the obvious answer is “study Kanji,” but getting to the level necessary to answer the kind of questions on a test like this would take years. Unless, of course, you studied all the questions and just all the questions on the test instead.

In which case, Behold! See the following list (warning, it’s 504 vocabulary words):

Just to be clear, I didn’t play the quiz a million times to compile this list. Rather, using a simple .swf (Flash file) decompiler I extracted the list of words used in the quiz and added English definitions for each of them. While it’s easy to look up the definition of a word on your own, I used a combination of not only EDICT, but also 英和／英和辞典, 国語辞典, 類語辞典, and Wikipedia to come to a “more accurate” English definition, or at least one I understood based on the dictionary-provided example sentences and explanations. Your millage may vary, and looking up example sentences or Wikipedia articles is probably your best bet in order to come to your own understanding of an unknown word.

If you were to actually memorize all the words in the list (all 504 of them), you would then be able to totally ace the Kanji test, thereby freaking the shit out of any Japanese person you know as you casually blast through a list of extremely difficult words without breaking a sweat. I know I would spend the hours necessary just for that reaction.

Finally, while the two videos above featured Japanese people struggling with the test, I did find one person who breezed through the test (multiple times) with extreme ease. Some people are scary…

I ended up finding this guy’s blog where he mentions filming himself taking the test—see this link. It turns out he likes to blog about studying Kanji specifically for the Kanji Kentei, and keeps detailed notes about his progress. Not only that, he’s also rather good at Rubik’s cubes, which should clue you in that the guy enjoys memorizing stuff and is good at it too. In short: he’s a bit better than the average Japanese guy when it comes to Kanji. Fear not.

Anime is fun to watch, but surely it's a cornucopia of Japanese to be learned too, right?

If you’ve read anything on the internet about teenagers and young adults trying to learn Japanese, you’ve probably come across the story of the sad little anime fan—the weeabooas he is also known—who attempts to learn Japanese, only to fail horribly. His excitement over anime leads him to believe he’d be good at learning Japanese; after all, when he finished watching all 500 episodes of One Piece he feels he has acquired a rather extensive vocabulary, such as the words 仲間 (nakama), 大丈夫 (daijobu), and 海賊 (kaizoku).

This reason this happens is simple: watching (english subtitled) anime will not help you improve your Japanese beyond getting used to hearing Japanese being spoken. Watching subtitled anime requires no effort on the learners part; in other words, there’s noresistance.

The first thing I should mention is that complete beginners should not try to learn a lot of Japanese from anime. It’s fun to pick up common words, and useful to learn various 相づち (aizuchi / filler words), but beyond that, I’m going to require the same prerequisites that I stated in my shadowing post:

Knowledge of Kana and basic Kanji

Decent Japanese grammar skills

At least a month or two listening to and understanding beginner-level Japanese. For example, after having gone through a level or two of Pimsleur Japanese.

To learn from anime, you need to set up a consistent study system where in which you’re not just watching anime—you’re learning from it. That means simply watching un-subtitled anime straight through is not particularly helpful: it’s too easy and quick. There’s no way to avoid actually spending the necessary study time.

Watch your anime with Japanese subtitles

Japanese subtitles are great things. You get to read and hear Japanese at the same time without any English interference. As a someone who (supposedly) isn’t completely fluent in Japanese, having the words written down will help with comprehension greatly. There’s a large collection of Japanese subtitles that can be found here. I’ll go with a personal favorite: Death Note.

Now let’s go over how I would go about studying:

1. Write down the Japanese sentence (from the subtitles). It’s important to write the sentence yourself even if you can just copy-paste it from your subtitle file: you’ll end up remembering more.

3. However, since this is an anime, you can also rip the audio using any recording program of your choice and use it in conjunction with your Japanese text. I used WireTap Anywhere to choose my video player as my input audio source, and recorded the audio to Audacity:

[audio https://sites.google.com/site/coldfrost/files/ryuk.mp3]

The test of your listening and speaking ability comes when you can repeat the sentence after you hear it without looking at the Japanese text—but you should look in order to see if you get the reading correct. Remember, there is no penalty for being unoriginal when learning Japanese. Even if you’re unoriginal, and are merely repeating, you’re correct. The point is to get yourself speaking in real Japanese rather than a strange mess of incorrect grammar and Japanese-sounding English words that beginners often find themselves using.

4. After you feel you’ve reviewed enough, such as making flashcards for all of the words you didn’t know, and after having gone through a good number of listen-and-repeat sentences as well, test yourself! Go back to the episode after a few days and watch it without subtitles. Hopefully you’ll be surprised at how much you’ll understand.

There’s no secret trick to any of this.

By using anime as your study material, you essentially turn your favorite episodes into your Japanese textbook. You have to create the study material yourself, but you’ll be better served in your learning process by doing so. While the Japanese in a good textbook will be no less valid than the Japanese in an episode of Death Note, hopefully you find anime more interesting so you feel actually interested in studying it.

I know that when I go through textbook sentences, while they’re not bad, they don’t exactly make me super-excited about Japanese either. However, as an anime fan, I’m able to vest more energy into studying because I enjoy it. And frankly, when I study something I enjoy, I’m much more efficient and I enjoy it much more.